Joint Exploration and Tracking: JET

Exploration and tracking by a team of robots have traditionally been considered as two separate problems solved in two phases: explore then track. This letter solves the multi-robot multi-object exploration and tracking problems simultaneously. A hierarchical architecture is used to coordinate robotic agents in the tracking of multiple objects of interest (OIs) while simultaneously allowing the task to remain computationally efficient. The primary contributions of this letter are probabilistic guarantees on tracking performance, automatic discovery of new OIs, a seamless transition from exploration to tracking, and the automatic balancing of exploration and tracking.